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For the three months ended in February, Apple had 38.9 percent of the U.S. smartphone market, up from 35 percent for the same period ending in November. Android fell to 51.7 percent over the same period, down from 53.7 percent. The United States is not the world, but it is a leading market for smartphones. So, it's worth paying attention to these trends. Apple has been able to eat into Android's lead thanks to increased distribution and lowered pricing. The iPhone wasn't available from Verizon until February 2011, four years after it debuted on AT&T. It later joined Sprint, then some regional carriers, and this year it's going to T-Mobile. Apple offers the iPhone at a variety of prices on Verizon and AT&T, from $0 to over $400. A free-on-contract iPhone has made it an option for more people. Android is a great operating system available on a number of excellent phones, some with gigantic screens. It's odd that it's gone flat. It's not just a U.S. phenomenon for Android, either.
HTC was the first company to ride the Android wave to smashing success. It is also the first company to crash on the Android wave. Here's a look at its revenue growth over the last 16 quarters.
What happened to HTC? Samsung. It released its phones on more carriers and it marketed the heck out of them. HTC was left in the dust.
For the last couple of years, sales of Android-based smartphones have been smoking every other kind of smartphone, including the iPhone. Android phones now account for nearly 75% of the global smartphone market. The next closest competitor is iPhones, which have about 15% of the market.
In the U.S., Android is clubbing iPhone 53% to 34%. Given such a disparity in phone sales and usage, you would think that things people do with smartphones--smartphone-based activities--would be equally dominated by Android.
But they aren't. They're not even equal.
In fact, iPhone users completely dominate Internet-based smartphone activities. A recent survey of mobile web usage found that a staggering 60% of mobile web visits came from iOS devices, while only 20% came from Android. A study IBM did of Black Friday online sales showed much the same thing--except that it was even more skewed. iOS (iPads and iPhones) accounted for nearly 20% of Black Friday sales. Android devices, meanwhile, accounted for only 5.5%.
Google Chairman Eric Schmidt revealed the company is now activating 1.3 million Android devices on a daily basis, up from 900,000 in July. For some context, Apple sold ~46.4 million iOS devices last quarter, or 515,500 per day.
Evernote, the popular note taking app, released data about average annual revenue per user across different platforms. Evernote has more than 34 million users so it's a pretty good window into monetization trends.
Apple's iOS platform, on the iPhone and iPad, generated some of the highest revenues per user. Blackberry was surprisingly high, but this is likely because many of them are enterprise workers (whom a note taking app would appeal to). Android was at the bottom, even below Windows Phone.
Evernote's data reaffirms that Android has a major monetization problem with app developers. Flurry recently found that for developers with apps on both platforms, Android apps generate only 24 percent of the revenue generated by iOS. App Annie was a little more generous, finding that Google Play (the main Android app store) generates about 40 percent the revenue for developers as Apple's App Store. However, AppAnnie also found that revenues were growing at the same rate on both platforms. In other words, the monetization gap is not closing.
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For example, every day more than 1.3 million Android devices are activated — which is way more than the 300,000 babies born daily. Users now spend more time each day surfing the web or on their mobile apps than they do watching television. There are more than a billion smartphones in use around the world, and age is no barrier — teens, adults and seniors are all well represented among their users. More than 60% of the apps in the Apple app store have never been downloaded (not even once)
Android's share of the Chinese smartphone market ended the third quarter at 90 percent.
According to Analysys International, Android's share is up from 83 percent a quarter prior and 58 percent a year ago.
With the Chinese market now accounting for a quarter of global smartphone shipments, Android's dominance there is driving its widening lead in global smartphone platform market share.
In China, Android's gain has mostly come at the expense of Symbian, Nokia's antiquated platform that will eventually disappear as Nokia shifts its product offerings on to Windows Phone.
Interestingly, despite its dominance, Google only offers limited support for Google Play in China and Android apps are usually downloaded in third-party app markets.
Apple, meanwhile, has never really gained traction after a weak market entry on only one of the country's major providers. The iPhone 5 will be available on two carriers, but as of now will not be distributed by the largest carrier, China Mobile. Additionally, while many Chinese consumers may fawn over iPhones, they are simply out of reach financially for a substantial part of the market.
A brief, visual history of the personal computing battlefield since 1975
The rate of iOS and Android device adoption has surpassed that of any consumer technology in history. Compared to recent technologies, smart device adoption is being adopted 10X faster than that of the 80s PC revolution, 2X faster than that of 90s Internet Boom and 3X faster than that of recent social network adoption. Five years into the smart device growth curve, expansion of this new technology is rapidly expanding beyond early adopter markets such as such as North America and Western Europe, creating a true worldwide addressable market. Overall, Flurry estimates that there were over 640 million iOS and Android devices in use during the month of July 2012.
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